CIS-A2K/Events/Wiki Advanced Training/2018

Wiki Advanced Training or WAT is a residential training workshop for experienced Wikipedians from India. The theme for 2018 program is Wikipedia content creation and improvement (advanced). The training aims to groom experienced Wikipedia editors from Indic language Wikipedias to write even better quality content on Wikipedia. The program will educate them about different levels of content assessment, global best practices, exploiting information databases etc. 2018 is the first iteration of this program.

User:Bhadani passed away earlier this year. He was a prolific contributor to Wikimedia Projects and was a source of inspiration to many of us. We'll pay homage to him and commemorate his contribution and achievement in an evening during the workshop.

Day 0 began with an introduction round, followed by an icebreaker activity. During the introduction round, the participants briefly shared about their Wiki-work and their area of interest. During the icebreaker round, participants were given random questions written by some random participant, and some specific questions as well. This helped the participants to get to know each other well.

The first day of the event began with an introduction to the program by CIS-A2K team – objectives, background, motivation and expected outcomes. Later the relation between World Wide Web/Internet and Wikipedia was discussed, which included a group activity. During the activity, the participants prepared a list of various sources information that they regularly read to get information. Post activity, there was a discussion on reliability of various sources of information such as blogs, interviews, news articles, press releases etc. It was followed by a session on article structure, during which various components of an article were discussed. This included points on layout of an article, writing an effective lead, sectioning and paragraphing, using links, media files best practices and common mistakes by users. This session went very interactive – participants shared how things work in their communities and their plans adopt best practices. The hands-on activity for this session had the participants to identify structural errors from top viewed pages of their Wikipedias. Some of the most commonly reported errors were untranslated infobox parameters from English, inadequate lead, red links, referencing errors and consistency.

Towards evening tea, there was a session on The Wikipedia Library. The participants were introduced to various program it has and features to offer. Following that a remote call with Felix Nartey and Aaron Vasanth (Global Coordinators; TWL) was conducted. They gave a deeper insight about the objective and vision of TWL, and also suggested various ways to improve TWL activity in India.

The day concluded with a homage ceremony in the memory of User:Bhadani. The family members of Bhadani were invited and felicitated. Wikimedians present cherished his achievements and several of them also their shared experience with him. Two senior Wikimedians who were present as participants for the event were also felicitated to honour their contributions to the movement.

The second day began with a session on important content creation activities such as
Wikipedia Asian Month

Women in Red

Project Tiger

Punjab Edit-a-thon,

and their best practices. It was followed up by a remote call with Addis Wang (Main organizer of WAM) who explained how huge content improvement campaigns are organised and also welcomed the participants to take part in WAM this year.
Post call, advanced Google search techniques such as using double quotes, site, filetype, intitle, inurl etc, were demonstrated. This was followed by a hands-on session for participants, which also helped to understand how these code-words work for Indic scripts. After morning tea, tools – Earwig's Copyvio Detector and Duplink – were demonstrated. Participants were also shown stats.wikimedia.org (also v2) and how it can be used to find out statistics for their Wikis. Following that, the good article criteria was discussed. During this good article system on English Wikipedia is shown, and also it was discussed on how it can adopted by Indic Wikipedias. Post evening tea, it was a session on MediaWiki basics with a gentle introduction to phabricator, user scripts, bot, gadgets and enabling extensions on local Wikis.

The third day started off with a discussion on reliability of sources; how various types of sources – primary, secondary, tertiary – can be relied upon in various contexts. In the group activity, participants listed the sources they use to write articles in various themes – biographies, science & technology, current affairs (sports & politics), art & literature, history, and discussed their reliability among themselves.

Before lunch brainstorming session about the future roadmap was conducted. It was discussed how the learning from previous two days can be taken forward to improve Indic-language Wikipedias. Some of the ideas include creating ten good articles and build the criteria based on them, mentoring new users on one to one basis, cross-Indic languages collaboration platform (village pump model; like Quora) and a technical (MediaWiki) help desk.